Hosting
I made a statement in the Joomla forums offering to describe how I use Varnish and Joomla together. Well...today is the day! Due to an unforeseen summer cold - I'm not doing the outside work that I thought I'd be doing, so it's time to make good on that promise.
As a webmaster, I’ve been crushed by Microsoft Deliverability issues, with their S3140 error—“part of their network is on our block list”—blocking my RicheyWeb server’s 1–5 weekly emails to outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, and countless business domains hosted by Microsoft.
Read more: Microsoft Deliverability - SendGrid and Blacklists
Staying ahead of the content game is tough. Whether you’re a blogger, marketer, or niche website owner, sifting through news, trends, or industry updates to find relevant topics can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Manual research eats up hours, and by the time you spot a hot topic, it’s often too late to capitalize. Enter AI automation—a smarter way to discover content opportunities that drive traffic, engagement, and revenue.
You know the drill: hosting life means sifting through 404 logs like a digital archaeologist. This week’s find? Thousands of bots clawing at my server for phpinfo.php in every directory they could dream up—most of which don’t even exist. My usual move? Redirect those suckers straight to an FBI hate crime database download. It’s my little “get lost” postcard—funny, sure, but that’s just the warm-up.
Read more: Hacking phpinfo()? More Like a Free Ticket to the FBI’s Inbox
I had an interesting interaction this week that I thought might make a good article. It all started with a bounced email.
Anyone paying attention to my AdminExile graph on the homepage will notice that for the past few days there is a ~200 attempt spike in the attempts to access /administrator on this site.
It's been a long time coming. Some of my customers are seeing growth rates that will soon outpace the ability to do any more vertical scaling of their websites. My own site was feeling the strain of several hundred thousand websites receiving XML update files daily. It was long past time to provide a solution for my customers (and my own sites) that could scale with the expected growth.
It finally happened. Although I've been running AdminExile with Fail2Ban for a long time, nobody has asked how to do it. Certainly, there are some admins out there who didn't need help. Someone finally asked, and that prompted me to write this document.